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As I was reading a post from Robert Scoble at www.scobleizer.com about bill of rights for participants in the social web, I realize that my affinity for the entire social environment, social networking, and social understanding idea is very strong. I didn’t plan this, most of our positions about things like religion and politics get stronger in us as we grow and have a better understanding of the reality of life. Our social environment is part of it, the way I understand the terminology of social life on the web has mature enough for me to talk about it.

The bill of rights for the participants in the social web initiated with a post on the www.opensocialweb.org blog on Sept 5, 2007, several important people contributed to it. People like Joseph Smarr, Marc Canter, Michael Arrington, and the only one I recognize on the list, Robert Scoble. So far, they outline three items on this bill of rights that they expect to have it evolve; doing my part, I will go into detail on these items and include my own personal opinion on each one of them. Additional, I will try to come up with one more thing that, hopefully, we will all agree to and may be added to the bill.

The first item on the bill is the Ownership of your own personal information; personal information on the web without proper control is a dangerous practice. Which is why I separate my personal social sites from those who are just links to my website, making sure that only the people I trust gets access to my personal information. I make a distinction between social sites where my family and close friends have access to and those social sites that only hold a presence of who I am and what is my blog about.

The second items is Control of such personal information, I like very much those social networking sites that offers you the option to show people the entire content of your social space or just a limited version of it. I’m not sure but only two of the social sites that I belong to offer this type of services; I agree that this is something that should be a standard on every social networking site. It makes it hard sometimes to keep track of what you can say, show, or grant access to on every site to every person you know or wants to be added as a friend.

The third and last item is Freedom about the very same subject of letting people or sites you trust have access to your personal information. I think we need more of this, is not about having a place to share your thoughts or information about you, and is about having control over who sees this information. Control gets you to a level of confidence and trust on any particular service that in turn pays back to the content holder.

Do you agree with these statements? What would you add to this list? I’m going to tell you what I would add; we need some sort of assurance or certification. Let me explain this, would you believe if I tell you that I will be as discreet as I can with your information. You don’t know me, what assurances can you have. We need a place like Open Social Web to tell people who are trusted to hold tight on your personal data, who have had a breach on their sites that let personal data unprotected.

If these prominent figures in our industry can dare to set a bill of rights, can’t they also set the standard on who can be trusted or not. We all know that big names on social networking had let us down before, and a place that black list them will make them be more than responsible, keeping them on track so that they don’t let us down again. How that idea coping with this bill of rights idea? You think I’m way off the subject.

The only way to improve our commitment to security on social environments is to discuss whether we as bloggers are right or wrong, so I challenge you to post your comments on this post and share it with others. There you go Mr. Scoble; this is my contribution, “Security” or “Assurance.” Thanks for reading.